My band saw came with a mitre gauge. I do not use it all that much, but it sure is handy sometimes – so I need to keep it nearby. And why not go way overboard and make it in a complicated way? Why? Because I can.
I snagged a nice piece of oak from the scrap bin and cleaned up the best face with my hand plane and got it flat and smooth. I then squared one edge to that face using my shooting board.
I then sat the fence of my band saw to the thinnest corner, and used my band saw as a crude thicknesser by slicing off a sliver of wood, like so:
I then squared all the edges on the shooting board so that I had one flat face with square edges, and all the edges were square to each other.
I then adjusted my marking wheel to the thinnest corner and scribed a line around the perimeter of the piece, giving me a reference for thickness planing.
I then planed to the lines, rendering the piece 6S: all sides flat, straight, square and parallell.
With that done, I rested the piece on battens and left it for another day…
Iceberg ahead, Mr. Murdoch!
A couple of days later I had some time to zip out in the shop and do some quick work, so I went ahead and ripped the board in two, squared the edges and laid out for dovetails. Salty sailors will immediately spot the problem. The rest of y’all will get the explanation in a bit. This goes to show that one should either keep shop notes or “get back in the game” before the tools come out. I do not have the time to work in the shop every day, so project continuity is “jerky” to put it mildly. Anyway, onwards with the dovetails.
I placed the two pieces on top of each other and dropped the marking wheel onto the lowermost piece. This is a dead simple method to get dead accurate markings for the depth of the dovetails.
I then used my Veritas dovetail saw to cut the tails. I also sawed off the waste on both ends. But something was not right. The knife walls did not “work” as usual. That should’ve been a dead giveaway, but it was not until AFTER I had sawed my tails that I realized my blunder.
Dovetails should be in end grain, not in “long grain”. Sure, it would work to do it this way, but the piece would have absolutely no strength.
Well – that is not really accurate. It would have had enough strength for what I am building, but I thought it was better to start over. The piece of wood was a piece of scrap before, it can be two smaller pieces of scrap without any issues. And we barbecue our bacon cheese sausages using only planed and squared kindlings! One should not relax the standards!
Oh, well. There is just one thing to do: start over! And we do that on the next page.